Network Operations Centers and Help Desks all over monitor their systems
and networks with an open source product called Big Brother
– the freely available version is now
Hobbit. Here’s how to add a traffic light to indicate network
status.

In my recent twiddlings with Microcontrollers a project has emerged.
picSimon! A reimplementation of the classic toy using a single
chip, a few discrete components, a few switches, and 4 LEDs. So far it
is quite a hit at home and the office. Shawn (my 6 year-old son) has
gotten up to about 6 moves, I have gotten 18 (once) and at the office
12-15 seems to be the range.

This project was a nice little Christmas present for my kids, and a
prototype for Me. Using MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator,
I built a “universal” arcade machine. The style of the case is a 3/4
scale version of Defender, one of my favorite arcade games.

Many programs are modified during their useful life, either to correct
errors or to extend their capabilities. It has been estimated that as
much as 80% of the cost of software development is incurred by such
modifications during the so-called “maintenance period” of the software
lifecycle. In most cases, the programmers making the modifications are
not the authors of the program, and their task is eased
if the code has been written to be understood. We here discuss a few
techniques which help to make the source code of a program more
intelligible. Part of your grade on the programming assignments for this
course will be determined by how thoughtfully you incorporate these
ideas in your solutions to the problems.

Well after some playing around in my "side yard" my Big Ugly Dish (BUD) is up and receiving. This page is the story of how it all happened. Perhaps it will contain some helpful hints for other newcomers to the BUD world. Maybe not, but here it is anyway.

In this study, we consider the relationship of client IO requests
submitted to a file server and the server’s disk subsystem IO traffic.
We collected traces of client-server IOs and, during each trace period,
we also traced server storage subsystem workloads. We analyze and
compare trace pairs collected in each trace period. We evaluate file
server performance and investigate the relationship between client file
requests and server disk workloads.